Summer continues ...

Untypically for this part of the country, summer weather seems determined to pursue us into August without our having experienced much of the rain that had been promised. I'm going to have to water the garden again tomorrow ... 

A fairly typical Sunday, really - church service, followed by lengthy socialising in the car park (this will become much more stimulating, I'm sure, when we can go back to having coffee as we chat!), followed by lunch in the garden. I was so tired that none of the garden chairs felt quite comfy enough, so after lunch I fetched down the basket chair from our bedroom and promptly fell asleep in it. We've had that chair since we were married; we bought one as a wedding present for friends and liked it so much we bought one for ourselves later, from the Blind Asylum shop in George Street in Edinburgh. I have a feeling Himself's parents were friendly with someone who ran it ...Anyway, when we were first wed we lived in a ground-floor flat in Hyndland, in the West End of Glasgow, and on hot days after work I used to take this self-same chair to the close mouth and sit there sipping sherry ...

Later we went for a sedate seaside walk at Toward. We'd thought of going a little further than we did, but the council roads department had been out doing what passes for resurfacing here: they spread tar and stones, and leave the traffic to finish the job by driving over it at no more than 20mph. By the time you've been on it for a minute your car tyres are full of stones which may also have jiggered up something in the bottom of the car, so we desisted and walked round to Toward Lighthouse and back. MY collage shows four views on this walk; the top left corner is the residential bit round the lighthouse where two large, relatively new houses have recently been sold (you can see the red and white signs). We've often thought we'd love to live down here; dear friends had a house built right on the shore when they retired from the church and we spent a great many hours there, playing croquet on the (slightly lumpy) lawn and even having overnight stays en famille after parties. But we never got round to it; Jane moved into town when her husband died; the seven miles back to Dunoon seemed a long way to go when there was only one bus an hour; proximity to doctors, dentist, shops, even hospital - all these began to seem more important even as we acquired the financial ability to move, and so we stayed put.

But I've loved these open skies and the views south to Arran ever since these early visits, the profusion of wild flowers on the edge of the shore, the contrast between the trimly suburban appearance of the houses and the wide open spaces around them, and every walk there is taken in the company of friendly ghosts. 

And as I head to bed, I'm relieved to hear from my family, currently heading through France to Spain to end their holidays there. It's annoying, really, this compulsion to know that they're in for the night. Time they started fretting about us instead?